Jim Holyoak: Vestigial Trail

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Jim Holyoak, "Alterity of Person and Place," 2022

Vestigial Trail

Drawings and written work by Jim Holyoak

All his life, Jim Holyoak has drawn and contemplated the monstrous, and in recent years he has voraciously read books on Monster Theory, the scholarly study of monsters. Whether a ‘monster’ is perceived as wonderful or terrible, wrathful or protective, human or nonhuman, is a distinction made in the eye of the beholder. Monsters are speculative beings that simultaneously don’t, did or might exist. They are the unknown, the misunderstood and the profoundly different. There are monstrous situations, behaviours and attitudes, monstrous feelings, places and times. Thinking about monsters is an exercise in alterity – the study of otherness – and our resultant capacities for empathy, cruelty and indifference – making strange and making kin. ‘Othering’ that which is different from oneself is a process that might otherwise be called ‘Monstering.’